3. In recent months four Wall Street investment banks separately valued Spanx at an average $1 billion, a sum Forbes corroborated with the help of industry analysts. Blakely owns 100% of the private company, has zero debt, has never taken outside investment and hasnt spent a nickel on advertising.

4. At 41 shes the youngest woman to join this years Worlds Billionaires list without help from a husband or an inheritance. She is part of a tiny, elite club of American women worth ten figures on their own, including Oprah Winfrey and Meg Whitman.

5. ...husband Jesse Itzler, ...regards Blakelys accomplishments with amazement and amusement. Shes 50% Lucille Ball, 50% Einstein....On the way to the Screen Actors Guild Awards one year, Blakely realized in the limo shed forgotten her jewelry at her hotel. Instead of turning back, she had her driver stop at a candy storeand accessorized her gown with stretchable candy necklaces and bracelets.

6. After getting a degree in legal communications at Florida State, Blakely twice took the LSAT exam for law school admission and twice scored abysmally. Frustrated, she drove from Clearwater to Orlando to audition for a job at Disney World. Two inches too short to fill the 5-foot-8 Goofy costume, she instead spent eight hours a day on a moving walkway buckling visitors into their seats at Epcots now closed World of Motion ride.

7. She spent the next seven years at Danka, then a $1 billion Florida-based office supply company, now part of Japanese printer giant Ricoh. It taught her the art of the cold call. They gave me a cubicle, a phone book and a territory of four zip codes in Clearwater and said, Now go sell $20,000 of fax machines a month door-to- door, she recalls.

8. she noticed that the control-top eliminated panty lines and made her tiny body look even firmer. Shed bought a new pair of cream slacks for $78 at Arden B and was keen to wear them to a party. I cut the feet off my pantyhose and wore them underneath, she says. But they rolled up my legs all night. I remember thinking, Ive got to figure out how to make this.

9. Blakely, then 27, moved to Atlanta, set aside her entire $5,000 savings and spent the next two years meticulously planning the launch of her product while working nine to five at Danka. She spent seven nights straight at the Georgia Tech library researching every hosiery patent ever filed. She visited craft stores like Michaels to find the right fabrics. She sought out hosiery mills in the Yellow Pages and started cold calling, only to be told no repeatedly. Immune to rejection thanks to years selling door-to-door, she decided just to show up.

"The following is a quote from Elizabeth Warren, current favorite of progressive activists and a candidate for U.S. Senate in Massachusetts, which I found via MoveOn:
There is nobody in this country who got rich on his own. Nobody. You built a factory out there &#8212; good for you!

But I want to be clear. You moved your goods to market on the roads the rest of us paid for. You hired workers the rest of us paid to educate. You were safe in your factory because of police forces and fire forces that the rest of us paid for. You didn&#8217;t have to worry that maurauding bands would come and seize everything at your factory, and hire someone to protect against this, because of the work the rest of us did. Now look, you built a factory and it turned into something terrific, or a great idea &#8212; God bless. Keep a big hunk of it.
But part of the underlying social contract is you take a hunk of that and pay forward for the next kid who comes along.

Notice that the force of Warren&#8217;s argument derives from the notion that other people paid for various public goods, and that the entrepreneur in question thus doesn&#8217;t have a claim to anything more than a &#8220;big hunk,&#8221; the size of which shall be determined by &#8220;us,&#8221; i.e., a committee of the people who paid for various public goods, of what she has earned.

The conservative argument, to overgeneralize, is that our system of cooperation doesn&#8217;t work as well as it might because the state &#8212; which, let us stress, is only one component of a larger system of cooperation, which involves other components, including shared norms and beliefs that can be undermined or strengthened in various ways &#8212; has taken on too many roles, including a number of roles that it hasn&#8217;t and perhaps can&#8217;t undertake terribly well. "Elizabeth Warren&#8217;s Quote - By Reihan Salam - The Agenda - National Review Online

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